Month: April 2006

Last week Google introduced GData to “provide a simple standard protocol for reading and writing data on the web”. Based on ATOM 1.0 and RSS 2.0, this represents a significant step for Google towards adopting standard protocols that may one day open more of their applications to 3rd party development. At edgeio, we believe transparent access to data is a fundamental principle for all modern web applications to follow, especially when those applications republish content from 3rd parties.

We are especially interested in how GData will change the way people publish large datasets to Google Base. Since launching in February, edgeio has resisted numerous requests to support one of the many proprietary CSV file formats commonly used to transfer online commerce data. We firmly believe that the future is in standardized transport formats like RSS and GoogleÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s move is a strong indication that others agree.

While we applaud GoogleÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s move towards RSS, like Richard MacManus, we wonder why Google has not embraced semantic formats already developed by the Internet standard community. The GData specification, introduces us to the Google namespace and elements that handle contacts, location, events, etc. Yet these are already described by hCard, hCalendar, and various RDF elements like geo . In fact, Google may have taken a step backwards by defining things like gd:postalAddress which have no structure compared to existing formats. The Google approach works when you have a comprehensive geo coder and the necessary maintenance, but where does that leave smaller development organizations?

At edgeio we hope to see open standards prevail for both data transport and semantics. Like most modern web services, we rely heavily on RSS and ATOM for data acquisition and distribution. In future releases of edgeio we will be introducing more extensive support for microformats and, of course, encouraging the development of new formats like hListing.

Bob Wyman has a post in repsonse to an earlier Techdirt comment at Rob Hof’s blog regarding the key differences between edgeio and Craigslist. I have to say Bob, great post, I strongly agree. Although I still want to make clear – CraigsList is not our enemy or our target. But we do want to be a catalyst for open data, published for free, and shared for free. Thanks for the post.

We are announcing support for YouTube, Google Video, Skype and PayPal on edgeio. I have been having great fun playing with my new Sanyo Xacti HD-1 camera. The screen shot below shows an edgeio posting that contains a YouTube video (Google Video works also).

As of today you can come and do this yourself on edgeio. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Make a movie of the item you are selling, or want.
2. Upload it to YouTube or Google Video.
3. Click on “Create Listing” on www.edgeio.com.
4. Past in the code for your YouTube or Google Video.
5. Add code snippets for PayPal or Skype or both.
6. Publish your edgeio listing.

Cool stuff if I say so myself :-).

We will build in more explicit support to pick videos from your YouTube uploads and to pick Skype or PayPal buttons in future versions of edgeio.